Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Totally Explained

Everything about Llnl totally explained

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Livermore, California is a United States Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratory, managed and operated by Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC (LLNS), a limited liability partnership between Bechtel National, the University of California, BWX Technologies, Washington Group International, and Battelle Memorial Institute. The Texas A&M University System is also an affiliated member of LLNS. Until September 30, 2007 LLNL was directly managed and operated solely by the University of California.

Background

Along with Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, LLNL is one of the two United States laboratories whose founding mission was the science and physics underlying the design of nuclear weapons.
   LLNL is self-described as "a premier research and development institution for science and technology applied to national security." It is responsible for ensuring that the nation’s nuclear weapons remain "safe, secure, and reliable" through application of advances in science, engineering, and technology. The laboratory also applies its special expertise and multidisciplinary capabilities to preventing the and use of weapons of mass destruction, and to bolstering homeland security. Those capabilities are also utilized in programs in non-defense areas such as basic science, energy, environmental science, and biosciences.
   LLNL is home to many of the most powerful computer systems in the world, according to the TOP500 list, including Blue Gene/L, the world's fastest computer as of 2005. Since 1978 the laboratory has received a total of 113 prestigious R&D 100 Awards, including seven in 2006, the most for any institution. The awards are given annually by the editors of R&D Magazine to the most innovative ideas of the year.
   LLNL's main facility is located on a one mile² (2.6 km²) site at the eastern outskirts of Livermore, California. Site 300, a 28.3 km² (11 m²) remote explosive/experiment testing site, is situated about 24 km (15 mi) to the southeast. Lawrence Livermore has an annual budget of about US$1.6 billion and a staff of over 8,000 LLNS LLC employees, as well as 1,500 contract employees. Additionally, there are approximately 100 DOE employees stationed at the laboratory to provide federal oversight of LLNL's work for the DOE.

Origins

The main site, at the location of a former World War II Naval Training Station, was originally used to house projects of the University of California Radiation Laboratory which were too large for its location in the Berkeley Hills above the University of California, Berkeley campus. In 1949, Edward Teller suggested to Ernest Lawrence, head of the Berkeley lab, now known as the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), that a second weapons lab be created as "competition" with the lab which sprung up to create the first nuclear weapon, Los Alamos National Laboratory. Teller's advocacy for the lab was also in response to his frustrations with the low priority he felt his idea of a hydrogen bomb was getting at Los Alamos. In 1951, Teller formally appealed to the Atomic Energy Commission for the creation of the laboratory, and in September 1952 the lab was formally founded as the Livermore branch of the University of California Radiation Laboratory (Lawrence's lab in Berkeley). Despite Teller's original motivation, however, the hydrogen bomb was invented and designed at Los Alamos.
   Thirty-two-year-old Herbert York was appointed the first director of the Lab. York set out to develop the Lab's program and created four main elements: Project Sherwood (the Magnetic Fusion Program), diagnostic weapon experiments (both for Los Alamos and Livermore), the design of thermonuclear weapons, and a basic physics program. The first two facilities were a building to house the latest electronic computer, a UNIVAC I, and a technology building with a large central bay for lifting heavy equipment. It its early years, Livermore attempted to distinguish itself by investigating radical weapons designs that hadn't been proven; as a result, its first three nuclear tests were unsuccessful fizzles, much to the amusement of their new "rivals" at Los Alamos.
   In 1958, after the death of Ernest O. Lawrence, the lab was renamed Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. It would later be renamed to its current name of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1979. Throughout the Cold War, Lawrence Livermore competed with Los Alamos to design the nation's nuclear arsenal, as well as perform other science and technology related tasks (some classified, some not). Warheads designed at Livermore include the Mk 27, the W38, the W45, the W56, the W62, the W70, the B83, and the W84, and the W87. Of these, four are currently in the U.S. "enduring stockpile". In the early 1990s their weapons work shifted into stockpile stewardship. In March 2007, a Livermore weapons design was chosen for the Reliable Replacement Warhead.
   Historically the two national laboratories in Berkeley and Livermore named after Ernest O. Lawrence, have had very close relationships on research projects, business operations, and staff. In fact, LLNL wasn't officially severed administratively from LBNL until the early 1970s. To this day, in official planning documents and records, LBNL is designated as "Site 100", LLNL as "Site 200", and LLNL's experimental testing area located near Tracy, California as "Site 300".
   On October 1, 2007 the Alameda County Fire Department (ACFD) began providing fire, medical and hazardous material emergency services to the Laboratory. Alameda County hired all 41 LLNL fire department personnel, who remained assigned to fire stations at the main Laboratory site as well as Site 300.
   The contract allowed the Laboratory fire department to continue providing services it provided as a University of California public fire department, but which could no longer be provided under LLNS, a private entity. Laboratory fire department staffing levels, security clearance requirements, response schedules, and training requirements didn't change. Working through Alameda County, LLNL continues to manage the Alameda County Regional Communication Center.
   With the addition of LLNL, the ACFD consists of 26 fire companies and 21 fire stations that serve the unincorporated areas of Alameda County, the City of San Leandro, the City of Dublin and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).

Non-weapons projects

A current project is the "small, sealed, transportable, autonomous reactor" or "SSTAR". It is designed to be a "world" nuclear reactor, that can give countries with smaller or less-well-developed electricity grids a self-contained reactor that would operate for 30 years without refueling and then be retrieved - thus preventing the host nation from accessing any plutonium created as a by-product of the nuclear reaction.
   Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is a partner in the Joint Genome Institute (JGI) located in Walnut Creek, California. JGI was founded in 1997 to unite the expertise and resources in genome mapping, DNA sequencing, technology development, and information sciences pioneered at the three genome centers at UC's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).
   Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has worked out several energy technologies in the field of coal gasification, oil shale retorting, geothermal energy, advanced battery research, solar energy, and fusion energy. Main oil shale processing technologies worked out by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are LLNL HRS (hot-recycled-solid), LLNL RISE and LLNL radiofrequency technologies.
   LLNL has been the leader in licensing and royalty income among the Department of Energy's national laboratories. During FY 2006 the Lab's Industrial Partnerships & Commercialization Office (IPAC) reported that LLNL received US$6.4 million in licensing revenue, of which US$6.1 million was from royalties. This was the highest among the DOE funded national laboratories.
   Also, during FY 2006, LLNL had 158 invention disclosures, filed 72 patent applications and received 72 patents.
   Most licensing income comes from the sale of products based on Lab technologies and licensed by IPAC. LLNL's cumulative licensing revenue for 1996 to 2006 was US$40 million - the most in the DOE sponsored national laboratory system. The bulk of the net proceeds were distributed back to the Lab's directorates, with most of the remainder going to the inventors and a smaller amount going to the institution covering some administrative costs, technology maturation and other technology transfer-related activities.
   IPAC licenses LLNL technology to industry to enhance U.S. economic competitiveness in world markets, promote economic development both locally and throughout the United States, and to help improve the quality of life for all Americans.

Key facilities

National Ignition Facility (NIF): a football stadium-sized 192-beam laser facility currently under construction, providing a unique capability for investigating the physics of special nuclear materials, as well as ultimately achieve a controlled ignition and fusion burn in a laboratory setting. "Early light" was achieved at NIF in 2003, and four laser beams are now operational—meeting performance requirements for component systems and supporting experimental programs.

Secure and Open Computing Facilities: the ASCI White machine, at over 10 trillion operations per second (10 teraflops), supported stockpile stewardship until it was decommissioned in 2006, and ASC Purple (100-teraflops) and BlueGene/L arrived in 2005 and were installed in the Terascale Simulation Facility and currently support stockpile stewardship.

Contained Firing Facility: located at Site 300 it's a versatile hydrodynamic test facility, recently upgraded to environmentally contain explosion debris.

Superblock : one of the most heavily fortified and guarded set of buildings in California. These facilities are used for special nuclear materials research, engineering testing, and storage.

National Atmospheric Release Advisory Center (NARAC): uses complex 3-D computer modeling to provide atmospheric pollution plume predictions in time for emergency response to the release of radioactive or other hazardous materials.

Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry: the most versatile system in the world for accelerator-based measurements of isotopic abundance.

Forensic Science Center: has exceptional chemical and forensic analysis capabilities and expertise that supports Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and law enforcement needs in the area of chemical, nuclear, biological, and high-explosives counter-terrorism.

Alameda County Regional Emergency Communications Center (ACRECC): LLNL is home to the main fire and emergency medical service dispatch center for Alameda County. The state-of-the art emergency communication center is located inside a secure area of the Laboratory. ACRECC dispatches for over 41 fire stations in 6 agencies in the County. ACRECC handles more than 75 000 calls annually in the cities of Alameda, Castro Valley, Dublin, Fremont, San Leandro, San Lorenzo, Sunol, and Union City, the Parks Reserve Forces Training Area (United States Army), unincorporated areas, and both LBNL and LLNL. ACRECC also performs emergency medical dispatch and ambulance transport coordination, and coordinates Mutual Aid requests for the entire county. Funding for ACRECC is paid by each member agencies and is based on their individual usage rates. In 2003 the ACRECC dispatch center underwent a US$1.2 million renovation, adding state-of-the-art computer-aided dispatch stations, lighting, computers, and radio systems. It is currently staffed by 25 dispatchers and supervisors.

Computers

The first computer the laboratory possessed was a UNIVAC I, ordered in July through September 1952 and delivered in April 1953. The June 2006 release of the 27th TOP500 list of the 500 most powerful computer systems in the world, has LLNL computers in the #1 (BlueGene/L) and #3 (ASC Purple) spots. A total of 12 LLNL computer systems appeared in the June 2006 TOP500 list, tying the number at Sandia National Laboratories for the most at any one site.
On June 22, 2006, University of California researchers at LLNL announced that they'd devised a scientific software application that sustained 207.3 trillion operations per second. This was the equivalent of an online game capable of handling 300 million simultaneous players. The record performance was made at LLNL on the IBM Corp's BlueGene/L, the world's fastest supercomputer, which has 131,072 processors. The record was a milestone in the evolution of predictive science, a field in which researchers use supercomputers to answer questions about such subjects as: materials science simulations, global warming, and reactions to natural disasters.

Other computers installed:

2 IBM 701s

4 IBM 704s

4 IBM 709s

4 IBM 7090s

1 UNIVAC LARC

5 IBM 7094s

1 IBM 7030 (Stretch)

1 CDC 1604

2 CDC 3600s

4 CDC 6600s

5 CDC 7600s

2 CDC STAR 100s

4 Cray-1s

5 Cray X-MPs

3 Cray-2s

2 Cray Y-MP8s

1 BBN Butterfly

1 Cray C90

1 Meiko CS-2

1 Cray T3D

IBM ASCI Blue Pacific

IBM ASCI White

ASC Purple

IBM Blue Gene/L

Peloton

Computer software

A great deal of software has been written by LLNL personnel to operate, monitor, and manage the computer systems at LLNL, including operating system extension such as CHAOS (Linux Clustering), resource management packages such as SLURM, and others. The requirement for lab programmers to write the software is due to the unique, one-of-a-kind nature of the systems — this had prevented commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software from being available. It wasn't until the Peloton systems procurements in late 2006 that a commercial resource management package, Moab, was to be used to manage the clusters purchased under the RFP.

Plutonium research and storage

The lab has approximately 400 kg (880 lbs) of plutonium and is allowed to have up to about 1,400 kg (3,080 lbs). However, it's prohibited from having actual nuclear weapons or nuclear explosive devices at its sites. Plutonium at the lab is stored in a fortified research facility guarded by a large force of heavily armed and specially trained security police officers. These officers are equipped with vehicle mounted and fixed location M134 Gatling guns that fire 7.62mm bullets from six barrels at up to 4,000 rounds per minute, powerful enough to take down an enemy aircraft or helicopter. At Livermore and at two facilities in Nevada, the lab uses plutonium for nuclear weapons research. It conducts experiments to learn how plutonium performs as it ages; how it behaves under high pressure, such as with the impact of high explosives; and how to dismantle nuclear weapons safely, without causing contamination.
In early 2006 the United States Department of Energy announced plans to move all the plutonium from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory by 2014, though transfers of the material could start sooner. By 2022, all U.S. work involving plutonium would be consolidated at a single new facility whose location hasn't been determined.

Directors

The LLNL Director is appointed by the Board of Governors of Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC and reports to the Board. Supporting the LLNL Director is a Deputy Director, a Chief of Staff, and the Laboratory Executive Officer. The current Director is also the President of LLNS LLC.
Also reporting to the Director are several key functional managers - Safeguards & Security, Environment, Safety, Health & Quality, Contract Assurance, Chief Financial Officer, and Laboratory Counsel.

1952-1958 Herbert York

1958-1960 Edward Teller

1960-1961 Harold Brown

1961-1965 John S. Foster

1965-1971 Michael M. May

1971-1988 Roger E. Batzel

1988-1994 John H. Nuckolls

1994-2002 C. Bruce Tarter

2002-2006 Michael R. Anastasio

2006-present George H. Miller

Organization

Director

Deputy Director

Security Director

Environment, Safety, Health & Quality Director

Laboratory Legal Counsel

Contract Assurance Officer

Chief Financial Officer

Principal Associate Director for Science & Technology

Chemistry, Materials, Earth and Life Science Directorate
Computation and Simulations Directorate
Engineering Directorate
Physical Sciences Directorate

Principal Associate Director for Global Security

Non-proliferation Program
Domestic Security Program
Defense Program
Intelligence Program
Energy & Environmental Security Program

Principal Associate Director for Weapons & Complex Integration

Primary Nuclear Design Program
Secondary Nuclear Design Program
Nuclear Weapon Engineering Program
Advanced Simulations & Computation Program

Principal Associate Director for NIF & Photon Science

Inertial Confinement Fusion Energy Program
National Ignition Facility Program
Target Experimental Systems Program
Photon Science and Applications Program

Principal Associate Director for Operations & Business

Strategic Human Capital Management Directorate
Business Directorate
Facilities & Infrastructure Directorate
Nuclear Operations Directorate

Footnotes

Further Information

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